Looking for cheap and best Router-switch?.

Discussion in 'Cisco' started by santa19992000@yahoo.com, Mar 5, 2005.

Guest

I am looking for cheap and best Router-cum-switch?. Which is the best?.
In US there are only 3 or 4 brands are available, but in Asia there are
like 30 to 35 brands are there it seems, lot of cometetion and price
was dam cheap itseems comapre to US.

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In article <>,
<> wrote:
:I am looking for cheap and best Router-cum-switch?. Which is the best?.
:In US there are only 3 or 4 brands are available, but in Asia there are
:like 30 to 35 brands are there it seems, lot of cometetion and price
:was dam cheap itseems comapre to US.

You won't get very far unless you name some specs. Managable or not?
Number of ports? Port speeds? Number of copper/gbic/sfp interfaces?
Routing protocols supported? Security features? Required VLAN features?
Required QoS features?

As for brands, I can name more than "3 or 4" off the top of my head:
Cisco, Nortel, HP, Netgear, D-Link, Linksys, SMC... and that's not
even including the numerous off-brands available in consumer
electronic stores.

--
'ignorandus (Latin): "deserving not to be known"'
-- Journal of Self-Referentialism

Guest

Sorry, it is my mistake, Actually I am looking for SOHO market (Home
office). if I have one Broadband connection, in a Small office/Home
office I would like to connect all 10 or 12 computers and printer in
Local area Networ, I am looking for 8/16 port switchs, which should
have FE ports with auto-detection.

Also I am lloking some products which should supprt load balancing, for
eaxmple in Internet cafe lot of computers shoudl connected to Internet.

I looked at their site, and do not find that information anywhere.
I see that they have a "report" on grey marketting available... to
businesses who send them a company fax that indicates the reason why
they are interested. It isn't clear whether the "report" names names.
But it doesn't really matter whether it does, because the report
is only about Grey Market activities, not about counterfeiting.

I looked at the Press portion of their site, and do not see
anything about counterfeiting there. Every single item I checked
was about grey market (not counterfeit) activity, and every single
suit I could see was against North American principles --
channel partners, warrantee companies, professors at US universities
claiming educational discounts fraudulantly.

But perhaps I just missed the page. Could you point out particular
URLs there, or navigation instructions if a master URL with frames
are involved?
--
"Who Leads?" / "The men who must... driven men, compelled men."
"Freak men."
"You're all freaks, sir. But you always have been freaks.
Life is a freak. That's its hope and glory." -- Alfred Bester, TSMD

In article <>,
<> wrote:
:Sorry, it is my mistake, Actually I am looking for SOHO market (Homeffice). if I have one Broadband connection, in a Small office/Homeffice I would like to connect all 10 or 12 computers and printer in
:Local area Networ, I am looking for 8/16 port switchs, which should
:have FE ports with auto-detection.

:Also I am lloking some products which should supprt load balancing, for
:eaxmple in Internet cafe lot of computers shoudl connected to Internet.

That sounds like a separate requirement, possibly with a different
number of ports and possibly with the addition of an uplink port;
also, in such a situation, reliability or redundancy become important.
[An Internet Cafe that is down with network problems loses it's main
excuse for serving mediocre food...]

Is it actually "load balancing" you are looking for, or is it
"rate shaping" ? Load balancing refers to distributing load to
resources equally, such as might be required if you provided
application services (e.g., gaming) or if you had a cluster of
servers that were acting as http cache servers for the user hosts.
"Rate shaping" would be used if you want certain bandwidths
per port, or if you want to restrict the actual network draw against
your WAN connection [e.g., if you pay by peak access rate.]
"Rate shaping" usually implies buffering and stuffing in packets
as soon as there is a chance to do so. There is also Policing,
another form of QoS, in which packets beyond a certain rate are
simply dropped -- which is not supposed to matter for UDP, and triggers
TCP congestion-control algorithms to slow down TCP.

Within policing and rate-shaping, an important factor is the level
you wish to police or shape at. Per-port is fair common, and per-vlan
is perhaps the next most common. If you want to go down to
per-application (e.g., allow full rate to http traffic but restrict
KaZaa rates) then your choices become much more limited and much
more expensive. Part of the difficulty there is that one can no longer
assume that a certain port corresponds to a certain application:
many of the P2P programs are able to fall back to using port 80
(normally http) in order to bypass firewalls or rate controls.

In the Internet Cafe environment, security also becomes more important:
users will not want other users to be able to spy on them or control
their sessions or whatever. And you want to prevent viruses,
trojans and other kinds of malware from using your LAN as an avenue
to spread between the various systems (especially if you are offering
wireless access to user-provided systems.)

When your business is at stake, it is ultimately self-defeating to
go for the "cheapest" router: if you are earning (say) $50/hour
in access fees then having your network down for a day while
the wait-staff tries to debug the problem is going to chew through
your profits, losing you easily $500 in a day. When you have a LAN
that fools and borderline sociopaths are going to have access to,
you need your networking equipment to be tough instead of cheap.
--
Look out, there are llamas!

On 5 Mar 2005 20:46:30 GMT, -cnrc.gc.ca (Walter
Roberson) wrote:
>In article <>,
> <> wrote:
>:Sorry, it is my mistake, Actually I am looking for SOHO market (Home
>ffice). if I have one Broadband connection, in a Small office/Home
>ffice I would like to connect all 10 or 12 computers and printer in
>:Local area Networ, I am looking for 8/16 port switchs, which should
>:have FE ports with auto-detection.
>
>Okay, managed or unmanaged? Load requirements? Security features?
>Any QoS requirements?
>
>
>:Also I am lloking some products which should supprt load balancing, for
>:eaxmple in Internet cafe lot of computers shoudl connected to Internet.
>
>That sounds like a separate requirement, possibly with a different
>number of ports and possibly with the addition of an uplink port;
>also, in such a situation, reliability or redundancy become important.
>[An Internet Cafe that is down with network problems loses it's main
>excuse for serving mediocre food...]
>
>Is it actually "load balancing" you are looking for, or is it
>"rate shaping" ? Load balancing refers to distributing load to
>resources equally, such as might be required if you provided
>application services (e.g., gaming) or if you had a cluster of
>servers that were acting as http cache servers for the user hosts.
>"Rate shaping" would be used if you want certain bandwidths
>per port, or if you want to restrict the actual network draw against
>your WAN connection [e.g., if you pay by peak access rate.]
>"Rate shaping" usually implies buffering and stuffing in packets
>as soon as there is a chance to do so. There is also Policing,
>another form of QoS, in which packets beyond a certain rate are
>simply dropped -- which is not supposed to matter for UDP, and triggers
>TCP congestion-control algorithms to slow down TCP.

To the OP, you might want to look at F5 and Foundry, among others.
Pretty far down the list you'll even find Cisco, assuming cost and
scalability aren't your top priorities.
>Within policing and rate-shaping, an important factor is the level
>you wish to police or shape at. Per-port is fair common, and per-vlan
>is perhaps the next most common. If you want to go down to
>per-application (e.g., allow full rate to http traffic but restrict
>KaZaa rates) then your choices become much more limited and much
>more expensive. Part of the difficulty there is that one can no longer
>assume that a certain port corresponds to a certain application:
>many of the P2P programs are able to fall back to using port 80
>(normally http) in order to bypass firewalls or rate controls.

To the OP, again, I just completed a detailed RFP on products that fit
this description, and ProQuent and P-Cube came out on top. Give them a
look if you're serious about policing, rate shaping, and not being
fooled by traffic that masquerades on well-known ports.

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